The Land of Lost Content: Children and Childhood in Nineteenth-Century French Literature

The Land of Lost Content explores the ways in which nineteenth-century French writers represented childhood and children in their work. Ranging widely through poetry, fiction, autobiographies, and letters, Rosemary Lloyd shows how writers as diverse as Baudelaire and Hector Malot, George Sand and Pierre Loti, Flaubert and Judith Gautier gradually responded to changing concepts of the self. After a study of central problems and recurrent motifs encountered in autobiography, a chronological survey of fictional texts shows the development of a series of myths of childhood successively debunked by later writers, who in turn create their own myths. Further chapters explore such central themes as reading, nature, and school, and examine the evolution of a literature in which the child becomes the main protagonist. This is the first study of childhood in nineteenth-century France to encompass autobiography, major fiction, and works for children, and to use as its primary focus the narratological difficulties of recreating childhood.